StoryCorps

A Black Chef At An All-White Club Who ‘Never Looked Back’

Clayton Sherrod was just 19 in 1964, when he became the executive chef at an all-white club in Birmingham, Ala. Sherrod, who is African-American, had started working in the kitchen there when he was 13, after his father had a heart attack.

“My mother said, ‘You can’t go back to school. You’re going to have to find a job.’ So I went to the country club.”

Sherrod’s friends thought he was crazy when he decided he would become a chef, he recalls at a visit to StoryCorps. “But I saw something that no one else could see, and that is me walking around with that big tall hat on.

“So I counted how many positions it was from washing dishes to the executive chef, and I had my chart pinned to the wall in our little outdoor bathroom there, and I would mark every time I got a promotion,” Sherrod says. “And then I would turn the light off, and I would dance.”

It took six years for Sherrod to work his way up from sous-chef. And Sherrod admits he had to be a little sneaky to land that executive chef job. But in the end, the club’s general manager turned to him and asked him to take care of the kitchen “until we find another chef.”

“That’s all I needed,” says Sherrod, who ran the kitchen for the next 13 years. “I never even looked back.”

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Yasmina Guerda.

Spalding Gray’s Family Remembers A Man Who Was ‘Never Boring’

by: NPR

It’s been 10 years since the writer and monologist Spalding Gray went missing from his home in New York. Two months later, his body was found in the East River in an apparent suicide.

The day he disappeared, his wife, Kathleen Russo, was leaving for work when Gray told her, “OK, goodbye, honey.”

“And I go, ‘You never call me honey!’ ” Kathleen tells her daughter and Gray’s stepdaughter, Marissa Maier, on a visit to StoryCorps. “And he goes, ‘Well, maybe I’ll start!’ So I left for work that day being hopeful that there was a future for us, that he was really gonna try to get better.”

After Gray went missing, people who thought they had seen him would send the family photos. “Did you hold out any hope that one of these people would be him?” Marissa asks her mother.

“At first I did, but he would never be that cruel to, like, disappear into the world and let us think that he was dead and start a new life somewhere else,” Kathleen says.

“He taught me how to think, how to see the world,” Marissa says. “And I was reading one of Spalding’s books and he wrote, ‘I know Marissa will survive and thrive for her whole life.’ And that’s such a gift, to have a parent write down how they feel about you.”

“He opened up my world, too,” Kathleen says. “It was never boring with Spalding. … He was such a great part of our lives, I wish he was still here, but we were lucky that we had him for the short time that we did.”

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Yasmina Guerda with Katie Simon.

Recalling His Inspiration, A Neurosurgeon Thanks A Teacher

by: NPR

This story originally aired on Weekend Edition on Sept. 25, 2011.

As a middle-school student in the 1980s, Lee Buono stayed after school one day to remove the brain and spinal cord from a frog. He did such a good job that his science teacher told him he might become a neurosurgeon someday.

That’s exactly what Buono did.

Years later, a patient with a tumor came to see Buono. The growth was benign but interfered with the patient’s speech. “He can get some words out,” Buono recalls, “but it’s almost unintelligible. It’s almost like someone’s sewing your mouth closed.”

“I’m talking to his wife, and we tried to lighten up the situation,” he continues. “They started asking me about myself.” They asked Buono who inspired him to become a surgeon, and he told them about his old teacher, Al Siedlecki, back at Medford Memorial Middle School in Medford, N.J.

The surgery was a success. The patient’s powers of speech returned. “He’s just excited and happy and crying and wanted to just hug me,” Buono says.

“You make sure you call that teacher,” the patient told him. “You make sure you thank him.”

So Buono did. Siedlecki hadn’t heard from Buono since he was in high school.

“I want to thank you,” Buono told him.

“I was flabbergasted,” Siedlecki remembers. “I said, ‘Of all the people in your entire career, you want to thank me?’

“It was the same feeling I had when … my kids were born,” Siedlecki continues. “I started to cry. It made me feel really important that I had that influence.”

Lately, Siedlecki admits, “I almost am afraid to say that I’m a teacher to some people.”

Not anymore, he tells Buono, “because you called me. I’m a teacher, and I’m going to help as many people as I can to find their passion too.”

Audio produced for Weekend Edition by Brian Reed.

A Home-Cooked Dinner That’s More Than A Meal

by: NPR

Yelitza Castro, an undocumented immigrant who works as a housekeeper in Charlotte, N.C., cooks dinners for homeless men and women every other Saturday night. It’s a tradition that started after she and her children spotted a man standing in the rain on a cold day with a sign asking for help.

Yelitza gave the man $5, she recalls, but her children wanted to take him out to dinner. She turned around to go back, but he was already gone.

“And we were thinking we have to do something,” she says.

Since Yelitza started her dinners, Willie Davis has partaken in many of the meals. “You don’t make us feel homeless,” he tells Yelitza on a visit to StoryCorps in Pineville, N.C. “You know us by names and faces. And we know you all care.”

Before he met Yelitza, Willie says, “I pretty much almost gave up. But that home-cooked meal, it just brought my self-esteem back up. And now I’ve got my own place.”

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Anita Rao.

Adrift In Frigid Water, Not Caring ‘If You Live Or Die’

by: NPR

It was 1966, and a ship called the Daniel J. Morrell was making its last run of the season, hauling steel across Lake Huron. The crew was eager to head home for Christmas. But one night, caught in a severe storm, the ship broke apart and sank.

Only a few of the crew members made it to a life raft, and only one of them, watchman Dennis Hale, survived.

“It took eight minutes from the time the general alarm sounded until I wound up in the water,” Dennis told his wife, Barbara, on a visit to StoryCorps in Ohio. “The main deck was starting to tear. You could see sparks; you could hear it ripping real slow like a piece of paper. …

“By dawn, I looked at the kid in front of me and there was some white foam coming out of his mouth. And I jabbed him, and I said, ‘You all right, man?’ And he didn’t respond,” Hale continues. “And behind me was another fellow — there was no response from him either.

“And so I kicked the third guy, and I said, ‘Are you OK?’ He says, ‘I’m hanging in there.’ We talked about being home for Christmas with our families. But he says, ‘It feels like my lungs are filling up or something.’ “

He started coughing, Dennis says, and then passed away “with his arm around me.”

“I guess my biggest fear right then and there was I didn’t want to be out there alone. When you’re in a situation like that, you don’t really care if you live or die, you just want the whole thing over with,” he explains.

The ordeal lasted 38 hours. Dennis tried to suffocate himself, but “all I managed to do was gag myself,” he says. “And before long I saw daylight again. At one point I heard this noise overhead, and I looked and it was a helicopter. And I waved to them. …

“And the next morning I wasn’t fine, but I wasn’t dead, either. Every day I’d ask the nurse if there’s any survivors. I figured I survived, why couldn’t somebody else?

“Finally one day she came in, she says, ‘You should stop asking. It’s been too long. If there’s anybody else out there, they’re dead.’ I just felt shame, embarrassment. I didn’t want to be the sole survivor. I just wanted my old life back. There were 28 people aboard. It was quite a loss — my whole family.”

Haunted by survivor’s guilt, Dennis refused to talk about his experience for almost three decades. But if he had a chance to talk to his shipmates today, he tells Barbara, he would tell them “that I miss them, that I love them and I’m glad for the time we had together.”

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Jasmyn Belcher.

Making New Connections On A Trapped Subway Train

by: NPR

Laura Lane met Paquita Williams, a New York City subway conductor, when their train was stopped underground for two hours. Generally, Paquita says, most passengers are nice, but “there’s times if the train breaks down, people think that’s my fault.”

With the power out, Paquita walked the length of the train, comforting nervous passengers. That made a real impression on Laura. “You really made everybody on that train connect,” Laura says. “We all started talking with each other like human beings. And we left the train and somebody was like, ‘Let’s do this again tomorrow morning.’ “

Putting people at ease is important to Paquita, a single foster mom who’s worked for the New York transit system for 15 years. On a dental visit years ago, she recalls, she was afraid and asked the dentist to hold her hand for comfort. He refused, and the memory has always stuck with her. “That’s why I do what I do with my passengers,” she says. “I want you to know that if you need me to hold your hand, I’m there.”

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Jasmyn Belcher